If you read our post about changes to our reference writing tool, then you’ll know that we’ve made simplifying your school’s university and careers guidance admin one of our top priorities for 2018. With a new academic term approaching, we’re pleased to announce our latest changes to a second major component of the university application process – Document Sending.
Acting on your feedback, including some surveys conducted by both our London and Hong Kong teams, our updates to the document sending process will deliver the following benefits for your school guidance process.
Let’s have a look at some of the changes in more detail…
This new feature will speed up and simplify the workflow in your school’s admission process. Teachers writing recommendation letters can now upload these letters directly to BridgeU and fill in the Common App form themselves.
When a student needs to request a reference letter from a teacher, the teacher will be sent an e-mail with a link to easily upload their reference to BridgeU’s document sending dashboard. In addition, teachers can also go back and make any amends to documents later.
BridgeU can now gather student’s data on their chosen application route for a university; this data is then displayed on a guidance counsellor’s Document Sending dashboard. This provides more context and information for guidance counsellors as they administer relevant documents for their students.
When a student clicks “Apply Now” on any given university in their shortlist, they will now be shown the options for selecting their application route.
If a student chooses to apply through any of the following application routes, it will now be displayed in the Document Sending dashboard: Coalition, Common App, Direct to university (via their website, email, post, etc), OUAC (Ontario Universities’ Application Centre), UC System and UCAS.
As you can see, when a counsellor logs into BridgeU, they will see these additional application categories in the Document Sending dashboard, which helps to clarify which universities fall within a particular application system. This enables guidance counsellors and teachers to better manage and administer the document sending process.
Previously, BridgeU universities which didn’t support document sending weren’t included in the Document sending dashboard. Our latest round of updates has fixed this, making the new overview of students’ university applications simpler and easier to navigate.
If you look at the Document Sending dashboard in our screenshot below, you’ll now see that we’ve also added a feature which lists the universities which don’t support document sending.
However these universities still appear on the advisor dashboard, meaning that a careers adviser will have a more complete overview of which universities their students are applying to.
Staff and career advisers can now see documents for a particular student or university application within any given date range. There are two components to this update:
Firstly, within the student side of the platform, we’ve added the ability for students to tell their counsellors which university deadline they are applying for. If a student clicks on the “Apply Now” button on any of their shortlisted universities, they will automatically be given an option to choose an application deadline. (This appears in the same window which students use to choose their application route, as we discussed in Section 2).
Now let’s turn to the counsellor’s dashboard. You’ll see that the student’s chosen application deadline will appear beneath its relevant university.
In addition, a counsellor can now easily filter applications by deadline, using the filter highlighted below. If you open the calendar pictured below, you’ll see that any pending deadlines in the application process are highlighted in yellow. This will ensure that your staff can better organise their workload when deadlines are getting closer.
Previously, some counsellors have notified us of their concern that students can add to their university application list at the last minute without the counsellor’s knowledge. This in turn means that a counsellor would be unaware of any new deadline in the student’s list.
So we’ve added a new feature to the platform, which will allow a careers adviser overseeing an application to add a cut-off date, and thus giving a counsellor more control over students’ application deadlines. Here’s how it works.
First, click on “School Settings” in the main menu on the left hand of your dashboard. You will then see a new menu item which says “University Application Cut-Off”.
This new section gives staff the ability to add a cut-off date for students to update their applications list. After this cut off date has been established, students are no longer able to add to, or remove an option from, their overall application list of universities.
Instead, the student will be sent a prompt to contact their relevant guidance counsellor or adviser. A counsellor will still have the ability to make changes to the students’ application list. It’s also worth noting that counsellors can also remove the cut-off date at any time if the need arises.
This is a very simple, but important change to the platform. We’ve renamed cover sheets so that they are now listed as “forms” throughout BridgeU.
This brings the terminology of the site more into line with what advisers are used to when filling in and sending documents, especially advisers who are using application portals such as Common App.
Finally, we’ve also updated the existing CommonApp forms and included Early Decision agreements and Common App Fee Waiver forms for eligible students.
If you have any questions about any of the new Document Sending features listed above, don’t hesitate to contact our Customer Support team, by e-mailing hi@bridge-u.com.
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